Well... until someone forks it to change the consensus algorithm, right? Or the programmers decide to make the change globally? Or the miners want a different consensus algorithm to make their mining more profitable? Or... Or... Or...
Other cryptocurrencies get around this by being more centralized. This includes Ethereum. These other blockchains make it significantly more difficult and costly to run nodes, which means fewer nodes run, mostly by large corporations so that they can exert control and fork the chains all the time.
Bitcoin is different. Anyone can run a node on an old laptop. There are tens of thousand of public nodes worldwide, who knows how many private ones. If miners ran a fork to change consensus rules, the nodes would just reject the blocks and the miners just waste electricity.
No offense, but it's the most incurious form of argument on a website dedicated to curiosity.
"On March 11, 2013, Bitcoin experienced a technical crisis. Versions 0.7 and 0.8 of the software diverged from each other in behavior due to a bug, causing the block chain to “fork” into two.
The optimal course of action (and, in retrospect, the only one that avoided serious risks to the system) was first proposed and justified 16 minutes later, and the developers reached consensus on it a mere 20–25 minutes after that. Shortly thereafter — barely an hour after the discovery of the fork — the crisis response had effectively and successfully concluded.
Without the central co-ordination of the Bitcoin Core developers and the strong trust that the community places in them, it is inconceivable that adopting this counterintuitive solution could have been successfully accomplished."
[1] https://freedom-to-tinker.com/2015/07/28/analyzing-the-2013-...
Secondly, this is 9 years ago and the Bitcoin network has grown quite a bit since then, meaning back then it was quite a bit smaller undertaking in getting the majority of the network to adapt the bug fix than it would be today. The core developers are also very paranoid about introducing these bugs which you can see for yourself by browsing the open PRs and verifying that anything that even remotely touches the consensus code is very heavily scrutinized.
"Really nice bitcoins you have there, it would be a shame if a anyone did a 51% attack on them."
Uh... because your comment is just straight up wrong?
For instance, miners don't have a vote or a say at all, unlike proof of stake systems. If a miner changes the consensus algorithm, that is forking bitcoin, but bitcoin itself goes on unchanged.
Of any significantly large site there will be a distribution of people for whatever reasons.
Who is to say who is "the smartest" ?
Perhaps people from the industry so people that share lingo, but most people here are definitely not “smart”.
And that still leaves out the possibility that regulators get involved and exert their authority to change the rules - which may be the most likely outcome of all.